Who says code for a blog is ugly? Or bad for SEO? Tons of blogs rank well.
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John Conde♦Jun 28 '12 at 14:56

Let me explain: if you look at the main page, the main content will be buried deep inside a blog post-like element. Is not that blog structure is ugly, is that it makes you cringe when comparing it to my business content. There's a dissociation between structure and content.
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legoblockJun 28 '12 at 14:58

@legoblock - Provided you have the main parts semantically correct - your title tags, header tags etc, the rest counts for very little. It's just noise to a search engine. Ask yourself, if your website contained extremely useful information or was the portal to a quality product or service, would it make sense for Google to penalize you for having ropey markup? I think not.
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AnonymousJun 28 '12 at 15:07

If the content is clearly labeled then Web Crawlers will have no problem in finding and listing your content on Search Engines. Using WordPress, you'll have a better chance at SEO then coding HTML by hand, wherein it automatically labels H-Tags, there is an area to put in your keywords, and etc. The backend may not be neat, but the frontend is very organized accordingly to hierarchy.
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nycmixingJun 28 '12 at 15:27

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@nycmixing - Wordpress will not give you "a better chance at SEO" than hand-coding. SEO is a process, not an obtainable goal. You have much more control when coding things directly - just as an example, rich snippets for vertical search etc would be a pain in Wordpress with a plug-in or by being able to directly edit the HTML. That being said, the OP isn't well versed in SEO it seems, so he may be better off with Wordpress to begin with.
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AnonymousJun 28 '12 at 15:54

1 Answer
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As long as your website is semantically correct (it uses html elements correctly, and doesn't use the wrong html tag [e.g. it doesn't use <div> instead of <h1>]), you should be fine. What matters more is that you have good content and good links.